Friday, June 30, 2017

Donald Trump's fledgling presidency has never been "normal," no matter the hopes of observers here and abroad, and no group suffers this reality more than the press, who have tied themselves in knots trying to cover him in conventional ways. It's high time they gave up the effort.

For Energy Week, Trump took a self-aggrandizing picture. Anything actuallynew on energy? Sure, some tweets. Well, that's almost like policy!

I've been watching in horror this whole presidency -- hell, during the campaign, as well -- as the mainstream media tried to cover Donald Trump and his minions as if they're normal. Sorry, but normal they're not.

People and the press are finally catching on. First, I spotted a Alex Pareene piece on Fusion in which he helps us confront this new "normal." Hint, folks: This normal ain't new.

What most of the worst people in Donald Trump’s administration have
in common is that they are Republicans. This simple fact is obscured
sometimes by the many ways in which Trump is genuinely an aberration
from the political norm—like his practice of naked nepotism rather than
laundering the perpetuation of class advantage through a “meritocratic”
process—and by the fact that many of the most vocal online spokespeople
for “the resistance” ignore the recent history of the Republican Party
in favor of a Trump-centric theory of How Fucked Up Everything Is.

But
it is necessary for liberals, leftists, and Democrats to actually be
clear on the fact that the Republican Party is responsible for Trump.
The Democrats’ longterm failure to make a compelling and
all-encompassing case against conservatism and the GOP as institutions,
rather than making specific cases against specific Republican
politicians, is one of the reasons the party is currently in the
political wilderness.

[...]

Nearly everything Trump’s done with his appointments and hires, even
his chief adviser’s devious plan to destroy the administrative state
through understaffing and the installation of loyalists and hacks at
every government agency, is just a continuation of a mission begun under George W. Bush.
Mike Brown’s sole “experience” before running FEMA was that he was a
friend of George W. Bush’s campaign manager. Bush’s ICE chief was a lawyer who’d worked for Kenneth Starr.
Monica Goodling, the central figure in the Bush administration’s
politically motivated purge of U.S. Attorneys, was a dimwit ideologue
lawyer with a degree from Pat Robertson’s bottom-rung law school.

Next
time you boggle at the sight of the president’s unqualified son-in-law
flying to Iraq to get briefed by generals on the facts on the ground,
remember that George W. Bush sent a business school chum to privatize Iraq’s economy and a 24-year-old with no relevant experience to reopen the Iraqi stock market.

Seen in that light, Donald Trump may not be the scariest aspect of this new Normal.

Another view of this comes from Josh Marshall of TPM. Donald Trump's pissing contests are at the core of his psyche: He can't help himself. Somewhere in his lifetime -- middle school, perhaps? -- he was scarred to the point where EVERY FIGHT IS THE BIGGEST FIGHT. What the media needs to do is drop out of this game because it's unwinnable.

We’ve collectively been living in Donald Trump’s house now for more
than two years. We know him really well. We know that he sees everything
through a prism of the dominating and the dominated. It’s a zero-sum
economy of power and humiliation. For those in his orbit he demands and
gets a slavish adoration. Even those who take on his yoke of indignity
are fed a steady diet mid-grade humiliations to drive home their status
and satisfy Trump’s need not only for dominance but unending public displays of dominance. He is a dark, damaged person.

Trump’s
treatment of the press is really a version of the same game, a set of
actions meant to produce the public spectacle of ‘Trump acts; reporters
beg.’ ‘Reporters beg and Trump says no.’ Demanding, shaming all amount
to trying to force actions which reporters have no ability to compel.
That signals weakness. And that’s the point.

How does the media drop out of this game? Start by treating Trump -- and, by extension, the rest of the Republican hordes -- as exactly what he is: a bully who doesn't deserve the bully pulpit. But have it he does, and it's high time the media stop trying to be deliberative and start being the front line of the resistance. Call out every one on Trump's horrifying tweets and every one of his or the Republicans' nearly endless lies.

It's what they do, and it's now the media's full-time job to stop this nonsense. Otherwise, it continues unabated while reporters try to frame polite, tepid questions.

For the most part, I've enjoyed the various jobs I've had in life, feeling that I was adding to, not subtracting from, our greater society both here and abroad (Not even slightly claiming to be perfect!). If I were Sanders, though, I'd be tempted to take off the mic and walk, never to look back.

Trump's team will, at some point, start to do that. How many are thinking harder about that today?

Through chicanery, gerrymandering, mastery of messaging (no matter how untruthful), and the corralling of white nationalism -- and a helping hand from conniving Russia -- the GOP now rules the roost. So what do they do? Wreak havoc on the government.

The Trump administration is destroying the government -- and the U.S. by extension -- with cuts and curbs and deletions all over the place. It's healthcare that's in the barrel right now.

To help the destruction along, Trump commits a classic manipulation of data. Here's his fake Twitter graphic from this morning:

Trump "gets" it wrong, and Vox puts it right. Plus, if Trump is misinforming by making a drastic cut in Medicaid look like an increase, then what he says the Democrats did is also a blatant lie. Oh well, it was for Trump's base, who'll believe him to the grave. (Oops, they might get there faster under Trumpcare.)

By way of explanation about the data manipulation: If my new lease says my landlord is raising my rent $500 a month, and I pay him only $200 a month more, I can't say, "But I am increasing my rent to you!" and not expect to get evicted pretty soon.

If healthcare costs are going up by 100% over ten years -- and the population in need of help goes up 10% -- raising healthcare spending by only 30% doesn't get you there. You can't say, "But we're spending more than we used to!"

The GOP is actively seeking a way to throw people off health insurance and uses the savings for tax cuts primarily for the rich. What kind of country does that? The GOP answers, "America, does that."

Wednesday, June 28, 2017

Not
really healthcare ninjas. They're tax-cut ninjas that were prevented
this time from taking healthcare away from the poor and working class to
pay for tax cuts for >500k-per-year people. (Actually not even
tax-cut ninjas because tax-cut EPIC FAIL THANK GOD.) (this time...)

Saturday, June 24, 2017

The point is the Senate bill -- or BCRA -- is singularly ill-timed to serve the baby-boomer generation that by happenstance are reaching the critical care phase of their lives. If you cut Medicaid as the GOP wants to, you trap a whole generation in a vice of insufficient care (not all boomers have reached 65!) as well as booting many of them out of nursing homes. Who chooses to do that as public policy? Hmm... maybe the guys pictured below.

Assuming these guys aren't idiots, that answers the stupid-or-evil question.

From the Medicare page that speaks about long-term care (which Medicare doesn't cover):

How can I pay for nursing home care?

There are many ways you can pay for nursing home care. Most people
who enter nursing homes begin by paying for their care out-of-pocket. As
you use your resources (like bank accounts and stocks) over a period of
time, you may eventually become eligible for Medicaid.

Got that? Whatever wealth you've acquired in your life is by design supposed to be eaten up by your long-term care. When it does, Medicaid is there. Unless, of course, the GOP gets its way. Holy shit. Talk about a death tax.

And just not to forget the rest of the poor and working class, regardless of age, the Senate bill dooms another 22 million to lose their coverage, though there's some overlap here. Anyway you look at it, it's a gruesome choice the GOP are making. People will die for tax cuts for the rich. Not close to funny.

About the American Human

The American Human is written by Calvin Ross, a retired teacher who at various points in life has been a musician, woodworker, restaurateur, narrator, English teacher in Japan, novelist, technology journalist, and private tutor to Japanese children here in the U.S.

Happily residing in the wine country of Sonoma County north of San Francisco, Calvin has lived in the Philippines, the Netherlands, and the aforementioned Japan, as well as in Chicago, Colorado, Georgia, and many different towns in California, including, of all places, the Mojave Desert.

Calvin, you may note quickly, is a liberal progressive who doesn't think being called a socialist is all that bad, especially since he sort of would like living in Denmark if it weren't so cold. He blogs because he can.